There are many different types of reporting systems for generating different types of reports. The reporting systems often include software applications or computer systems that are used for reporting data in different formats. Often, reports are generated in a type of generalized format in an effort to include a variety of different kinds of meaningful information, so that the report is meaningful for a variety of different recipients.
As one specific example, there are many different types of financial reporting systems. Financial reporting systems can be used to generate reports showing financial information for a company. A user normally generates the reports by adding various sections to a hierarchical reporting structure. For instance, a hierarchal financial reporting structure may include categories such as revenue, gross profit, expenses, etc. Within each of those categories, are subcategories, each having a number of different line items. For instance, the revenue section might include different lines each showing revenue attributed to a different revenue source. The expenses section may include line items showing different specific expenses. Of course, the hierarchical structure can be multiple levels deep. As such, many reports can be quite long and cumbersome to review.
It is believed that many who review the reports do not consider all of the information in a given report to be important. Rather, many users only consider a very small number of sections or line items as being important to the user's everyday function. Therefore, those users skip to the sections or line items that they believe are important, and either scan, or do not even review, the remainder of the report. Thus, the report users often need to scroll through an entire report to navigate to a location within the report that shows the data that the user believes to be relevant, so that those lines can be reviewed.
Other users want to review sections of the report in an order that is different from the order the report is presented. Therefore, the users often need to scroll up and down through the report. This is tedious, time consuming and cumbersome.
Some have attempted to address this problem by requiring users to design specialized reports, that is, reports that show only the information that the user believes to be relevant. Others have also attempted to address this problem by requiring the user to intentionally mark the rows of a report that the user believes are important. It can be seen that both of these attempts to address the problem require additional work on the user's part. One requires the user to generate an entirely new (and specific) report, while the other requires the user to go through the report format and identify lines that the user believes are important.
The discussion above is merely provided for general background information and is not intended to be used as an aid in determining the scope of the claimed subject matter.